A few months ago, still hyper after devouring "Deathly Hollows", we searched high and wide for a Jewish character in the "Harry Potter" books. We didn't really succeed.

Well, it turns out that we looked so hard we missed the most obvious one. As we just discovered, Harry Potter himself is Jewish!

OK, let us subdue our own excitement. Of course, the character of Harry is not Jewish. He goes to Hogwarts, not a yeshiva. He wears a Gryffindor scarf, not a talis. He drinks pumpkin juice, not Manischewitz. Etc.

But while Harry himself is not a Jew, the actor who plays him in the films, Daniel Radcliffe, is. His mother is Jewish, his father Protestant, and Radcliffe, although not religious himself, says that he is "very proud of being Jewish".

Come to think of it, Harry does resemble a stereotypical Jewish boy, glasses and all...